This article by Dr. Mahmoud M. S. Abdallah provides a comprehensive guide to formulating a research problem in education and language learning, particularly for TESOL/TEFL researchers. It emphasizes the importance of a well-defined research problem as the cornerstone of any research project, guiding the selection of methods, data collection, and…

This paper puts forward a research agenda in the area of explicit and implicit knowledge and learning of second or additional languages. Based on a brief overview of reliable findings as well as open questions in the field, three agenda items are highlighted. First, valid and reliable measures of explicit and, in particular, implicit knowledge and…

Research on input processing and processing instruction has often employed a scoring method known as trials to criterion to observe the effects of instruction that emerge during training. Despite its common use in this research (see Fernández, 2021) this metric has never been evaluated critically. The present study first discusses several…

This paper evaluates the use of Factor Analysis (FA) in English education research in Korea and suggests improvements in methodology. A detailed coding protocol was used to review 179 FA cases from 12 major English education journals (2014-2023). The review identified several key issues, including small sample sizes and lenient criteria for sample…

This case study examines the key steps and challenges that were involved in a mixed methods research project relating to Japanese first-year medical students' English academic vocabulary learning. Conducting mixed methods research can be both conceptually and administratively challenging under any circumstances. However, this study was especially…

This opinion essay begins by describing the problematic difference between "doing-research-on" and "doing-research-with," particularly in relation to classroom-based research on foreign/English language teaching and learning. In "doing-research-on," the researchers are the primary beneficiaries of the research they…

This study explored the challenges faced by doctoral students in preparing and publishing research in reputable international journals. A descriptive qualitative approach was employed to gather in-depth information from four doctoral students in three higher education institutions in Sumatra, Indonesia. The participants were recruited through…

This dissertation developed a new learner corpus of Japanese and introduced an error and linguistic annotation scheme specifically designed for Japanese particles. The corpus contains texts written by learners who are in the first year to fourth year university level Japanese courses. The texts in the corpus were tagged with part-of-speech and…

Swales' (1990) Creating a Research Space (CARS) model has spawned a large number of studies focusing on investigations of research article introductions (RAIs), and the reports have given meaningful contributions to guide novice and non-native authors in writing English RAIs. However, the investigation of authors' research gap strategies in RAIs…

In this Forum article, we discuss issues emerging from utilizing two significant theoretical constructs, Funds of Knowledge and Cultural Capital, in the field of second/multilingual language studies. Some similar underlying characteristics yet opposite perspectives surrounding the concepts and theoretical applications have confused researchers and…

In his philosophical novel, Thus spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche (1883-85), famously wrote, 'God is dead,' signifying that God is no longer credible as an absolute moral compass. Over a century later, Paikeday (1985), proclaimed that "The native speaker is dead!" in his book title, implying that the native speaker as the arbiter of what is…

Morphological awareness has been assessed longitudinally for monolinguals and bilinguals to trace the developmental trend. Researchers have found the important role it plays in literacy development including vocabulary growth and reading development. Conclusions about the important role morphological awareness play in literacy development are…

This article addresses ten 'tricky' questions related to narrative inquiry in the field of language teaching and learning research. The questions come from the author's experiences of presenting lectures and seminars on narrative inquiry in many different contexts. The questions deal with issues to do specifically with narrative inquiry methods as…

I found the need to explore the difficulties faced by Arabic-speaking English language learners studying mathematics as soon as I moved to the United Arab Emirates. Thus, I began a line of research that aimed to explain and understand these issues and find effective teaching strategies for the students. This case study describes the first research…

Interview-based research in multilingual situations can present researchers with specific ethical challenges relating to language-based power play, data handling and presentation. Studies indicate favouring the L1 (first language) as an interviewing language may produce better quality data, but external pressures can favour English as the dominant…